Thing #21

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

My experience with Animoto was stressful. I think there was some sort of glitch whenever I went to preview my video. I could not see what it was going to look like until after I published it. Luckily the video turned out okay. If it was not for that error in the system, I would have really enjoyed playing around with Animoto. This site really gets the creative mind flowing.

Thing #24

My Feedback:
Some of my favorite exercises were the ones using photos. I love creativity when it comes to educations, and I know students tend to be more interested when visuals and hand-on activities are involved.

This program has shaped the way I think about technology in regards to using it for educational purposes rather than for entertainment purposes. Times are changing, and students need to know the ins and outs of the world wide web and other electronic devices.

In the beginning, the habits of learning really got me to evaluate my mind and the way I look at education. Not everything will be perfect, some teachers will mark one paper an A and to another teacher it may be worth a D. You can't please everyone, but you can do your best.

Some parts of the 23 things seem to be redundant. Maybe they can come up with a test to take on the 23 things, and whatever parts are passed then the student can disregard those when writing their blog.

Since my classroom will hopefully be more advanced in technology then the classroom of my high school days, I plan to incorporate it more, but only when necessary. The Internet can be distracting to students, especially for high school seniors.

I plan on keeping this blog for future use. Right now as a college student, my time is limited. When I do have free time, I am usually napping or going for a jog. Blogging is not in my list of top hobbies because when I do have thoughts that are personal on a subject, I tend to keep them to myself. I do not like my business being shouted out to anyone, especially not over the Internet. As an adult, with a stable job and a more routine day, I can possibly work blogging into my time, and I can definitely incorporate it in my classroom as a teacher.

Thing #23

The Student Journalism 2.0 reminded me a lot of the 23 things. It allows students to express their thoughts through blogs on various topics. As an English teacher, Creative Commons is a resource that my students can use with their papers, projects, and personal knowledge growth. For extra credit, I can have students create an account for Creative Commons ("extra credit" is the magic word to any high school student's ears). I also used the Creative Commons site in my interactive document for Livetext. The document allows students to quickly navigate to specific links and see images about the issue of plagiarism and how to avoid it. Creative Commons gives users a safe environment to share their works.

Thing #22

I created three binders: Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer, and APSU. APSU is my private folder with information in regards to my time at Austin Peay and any resources I may need for tips, forms, or notes.



My first creation the Beowulf binder. It contains any relevant resources pertaining to Beowulf. I used Google search and it automatically synced the websites for me! Which saves me a lot of work.

LiveBinders can be used in the classroom by teachers and students. If a teacher has many websites or PDF files that she wants to share with the class she can have them all in one area. A possible assignment for students can be to find other educational websites or articles pertaining to a topic and place them in a LiveBinder. The binder can be shared with other students and the entire class will have their information in one place.

Thing #20

Youtube is one of my favorite sites. I can sit around all day watching funny videos of people falling or pulling pranks. You can find ANYTHING on Youtube. I use the site for mostly entertainment purposes, but teachers can find all kinds of educational videos on Youtube also.

I chose to post "Kid President" because sometimes you just need an extra boost to enjoy the next hour of class, or to make it through a stressful week. This would be a good video to play to my students during midterms and finals. I like how much Youtube has to offer in terms of the quantity of videos, but the quality of a lot of videos is poor especially in content. There are very nasty and vulgar things on Youtube which is why it was blocked from CMCSS computers. I am not sure if Youtube is still blocked, but there are other sites you can watch videos from that edit the content better.



There are a lot of interesting components of Youtube that could be applied to the Library Website. One being that after you search for a video using the title or key words, similar videos of similar content come up on the side. So once you finish watching the original video you searched for, you can move right on to the next video in sequence. Most library pages do that with articles.

Thing #19

I am a member of a few different types of social networking sites such as Pinterest and Wanelo. Both are sites where users post pictures of crafts, clothes, and other things with links to obtain a certain clothing item or find a certain recipe. I can spend hours just looking through at the many craft ideas, recipes, and cute clothes that people post.
Bake space was appealing to me because I love to bake and cook. This site has many recipes on it, but I did not want to join it because I do not have a lot of recipes to offer the site.
The Teacher Pop Ning site had many questions and topics that people commented on. I can use these many opinions to get an idea an what teaching strategy is best, or what piece of technology suites which type of grade level best. I can even ask my own question to get a discussion going and have many helpful answers to choose from! I like how Teacher Pop has to accept the person's request to join the site and that it is not open to the public. That is how Pinterest is also.

I am adding the TeacherPop badge here because it will not appear on my profile.

Visit TeacherPop

Thing #18

Twitter is my favorite way of communicating with my friends, catching up on the news, finding out who won the game, and sometimes reading a spoil alert about a new episode of my favorite TV show (unfortunately). There are all different types of Anonymous accounts that are there to make people laugh, and celebrities have twitters also.
 I like Twitter better than Facebook because its just for people's thoughts. No one is inviting me to play a stupid computer game or blowing up my time line with spam and invitations to play "Farmville" or whatever game they are inviting me to. I just like to see whats going on in those whose lives I care about but do not see often, or maybe pictures of a vacation, etc.
 Instructors need to know the importance of social networking because it is apart of the adolescents everyday lives now. I never go anywhere without my phone and I have been that way since my first flip phone. The future generations are going to become more tech savvy and soon a new social networking site will appear ten times better than the most popular ones of today.
I can only see the use of Twitter in the classroom if someone needed to do a biography about a celebrity or do a newsletter for the here and now subjects of our world. Facebook would be the better classroom option because people can create private groups. This would be good for group work, online discussions, etc.